01. A food production group is assessing the capabilities behind its recipe-management and traceability products. The assessment records deployment frequency and change failure rate for each team, together with the testing and coaching skills held within each team and the training its members have completed. The sponsor wants the findings to show whether the two products are earning the investment the group puts into them, and the agile test leader is reviewing what has been measured before they are written up.
Which measurement area does the assessment still leave out?
Select ONE option.
a) Maturity, which expresses the people and the processes behind the group's testing
b) Outcomes, which express the business value the recipe-management and traceability products deliver to the group
c) Outputs, which express delivery and performance across the group's release pipeline
d) Coverage, which expresses how much of the traceability product the regression suite exercises
02. A harbour dredging authority has mapped the development value stream for its dredger-scheduling software, and the map carries processing and wait time for every working step. The agile test leader now wants it to show, step by step, whether the problems that arise in a step are found in that step or travel on to later ones.
Today the teams record each issue against the step in which it was found, and nothing more.
What has to change before a phase containment efficiency figure can be added to the map?
Select ONE option.
a) Each issue must also record the step in which it arose, so that the two counts can be compared.
b) Each step must record the share of the work arriving that was usable exactly as received, which gives the same picture from the receiving side of each handover.
c) The teams must record the elapsed time between an issue being introduced and being found, so that containment can be measured across the working steps.
d) The teams must express the issues found in each step as a share of all the issues found across the stream, which shows where detection is concentrated.
03. A legal services provider runs six teams on one platform. One team has cut test-database provisioning from two days to under an hour over three PDCA cycles, and has written down its method. The other five provision test data differently, and none has asked for help.
What should the agile test leader do?
Select ONE option.
a) Leave the method with the team that built it, since the other five provision differently and none of them has asked for it
b) Have the successful team repeat its PDCA cycle jointly with one other team at a time until all six have adopted the method
c) Bring the method to the product-level improvement board and a multi-team retrospective so the other teams can take it up
d) Mandate the method through the organizational test strategy, so all six teams provision test data in the same way
04. A recruitment platform company measured its development value stream before and after automating the integration test suite. Releases leave the stream in a fixed weekly slot, which did not change.
Before automation:
Intake and triage - processing 1 day, wait 1 day
Development - processing 5 days, wait 2 days
Integration testing - processing 3 days, wait 6 days
Release - processing 1 day, wait 2 days
After automation:
Intake and triage - processing 1 day, wait 1 day
Development - processing 5 days, wait 2 days
Integration testing - processing 1 day, wait 6 days
Release - processing 1 day, wait 4 days
The team is asking whether the automation was worth the four iterations it took to build.
Which reading of the two maps is best supported?
Select ONE option.
a) The automation has not paid back yet, and the suite will need a few more iterations of tuning before the lead time starts to respond to it.
b) Lead time is unchanged at twenty-one days: the two days left integration testing and reappeared as waiting for the weekly release slot, so the release cadence is where the next improvement belongs.
c) Flow efficiency fell from about forty-eight percent to about thirty-eight percent across the two maps, so the automation made the stream worse and the change should be reverted.
d) The figures contain a recording error, because processing time removed from one working step cannot reappear as wait time at a later step in the stream.
05. A subtitling services company has mapped the development value stream for changes to its timing engine. The figures are per change:
Intake and refinement - processing 1 day, wait 2 days
Implementation - processing 4 days, wait 2 days
Functional verification - processing 3 days, wait 4 days
Accessibility review - processing 2 days, wait 5 days
Release - processing 1 day, wait 3 days
The reviewers say their five waiting days are spent waiting for functional verification to finish. The team proposes that both reviews begin when implementation hands the change over. The reviewers then expect one waiting day and the same two days of work, and functional verification's figures do not change.
What lead time should the future state map show?
Select ONE option.
a) Twenty days, because the two reviews together now contribute the seven elapsed days of the longer of them instead of fourteen days in sequence.
b) Twenty-five days, because the accessibility review's two processing days are the only time the change no longer spends in the stream.
c) Twenty-three days, because the accessibility review's queue shortens from five days to one and nothing else in the stream changes.
d) Twenty-two days, because the accessibility review's five waiting days disappear while its two days of work still follow functional verification.
06. A veterinary practice software group has mapped the development value stream for its appointment and dispensing product. Last quarter the verification step received one hundred changes and sent thirty-one of them back to implementation, where each was reworked and then verified a second time. The map shows a single path of refinement, implementation, verification and release, with one elapsed figure at each step.
The agile test leader wants the map to show what happens to the thirty-one changes.
Which two entries should she add?
Select TWO options.
a) The return path from verification back to implementation, with the share of changes that take it, so that the map shows the flow as it runs.
b) A separate map for the changes that pass first time, so that the stream can still be shown working in the way the group designed it to work.
c) The thirty-one returns as verification's phase containment efficiency, because that figure counts what the step finds.
d) The extra elapsed time a returned change spends on its second pass, so that the lead time covers the path those changes take.
e) The rework as extra processing time at verification, since that is where the returns are raised.
07. Agile teams at a waste management company build a causal loop diagram to understand defects escaping into the recycling-plant control system. The group has agreed four variables and has put a sign on every link:
Release pressure to time spent on automated checks: minus
Time spent on automated checks to escaped defects: minus
Escaped defects to unplanned rework: plus
Unplanned rework to release pressure: plus
How should the group mark this loop, and what follows for the step after that?
Select ONE option.
a) As unmarked for now, because a loop marker can only be assigned once a delay has been placed on every link that does not act at once.
b) As a balancing loop, because the rework the loop produces will eventually use up the capacity that release pressure depends on.
c) As a balancing loop, because two of the four links carry a minus sign, and those links work against the effect travelling round it.
d) As a reinforcing loop, because the two minus signs cancel and pressure ends up raising itself, which points the group towards an intervention that breaks one of the links.
08. An agile test leader at an agricultural machinery manufacturer facilitates a causal loop diagram workshop on slow feedback for harvester firmware. The group has agreed four variables and how each one acts on the next:
When manual regression effort rises, the time to complete a test cycle rises
When the time to complete a test cycle rises, the number of changes batched into one release rises
When the number of changes batched into one release rises, the effort needed to isolate a failure rises
When the effort needed to isolate a failure rises, the time available for automating checks falls
Which causal link should carry a minus sign when the group draws the diagram, and why?
Select ONE option.
a) The link from manual regression effort to the time to complete a test cycle, because both variables describe effort the teams are trying to reduce.
b) The link from the number of changes batched into one release to the effort needed to isolate a failure, because batching work is a form of waste.
c) The link from the effort needed to isolate a failure to the time available for automating checks, because a rise in the first variable produces a fall in the second.
d) The link from the time to complete a test cycle to the number of changes batched into one release, because a longer cycle is a delay.
09. At an energy grid operator, system testing of the load-forecasting service takes three weeks because every change requires the whole monolithic application to be rebuilt and re-tested end to end. The teams propose adding two testers to the system testing step.
Why does an agile test leader who applies systems thinking question that proposal?
Select ONE option. A
a) Software architecture is a typical value stream bottleneck, so more testers treat a symptom rather than a cause.
b) System testing is a typical bottleneck in a development value stream, so the improvement should shorten that step rather than examine anything else first.
c) An improvement decided inside the teams will not scale, so the proposal belongs in a multi-team retrospective before it is tried.
d) The teams should agree a single root cause for the three-week duration before any change to the working step is proposed.
10. Two teams building a recruitment platform ran a PDCA cycle to cut the time their candidate-matching changes spend waiting for a test environment. In the Do step they introduced a booking calendar for the shared environment and required every change to be booked a day in advance. The Check step shows the waiting time unchanged, and the teams now queue for booking slots as well as for the environment.
How should the agile test leader take this cycle forward?
Select ONE option.
a) Record shared environments as the single root cause of the delay and close the cycle, so that the improvement effort can move on to the next impediment.
b) Roll the booking calendar out to the remaining teams, because the effect on waiting time should become visible at a larger scale.
c) Standardize the booking calendar in the Act step and move on, because the teams have already absorbed the effort of introducing it.
d) Use what the Check step revealed to revise the assumption about what causes the waiting, and plan a further iteration of the cycle.